January 27, 2017

To hope, or despair?

Whenever there is an authoritarian coup rooted in an irrational ideology, well-meaning people insist that it can’t persist because the results are going to be so obviously bad for the people who believe in it, whether it’s the theocratic revolution in Iran or the first truly autocratic Administration in America. Tragically, terribly, this is never the way it works.

Then comes — hope?

On the positive side, well, there were the women’s marches last weekend, which filled any sane heart with hope. What had seemed doubtful a short week before — that there could be unified, peaceful, indeed joyous mass action against the madness — was fully realized, and for what one hopes will be only the first of many times.

I have tried to reconcile Gopnik's initial musing about a "truly autocratic Administration" that will persist (which I interpret, not unfairly I think, as a journey into perpetuity) because its wholesome antithesis is "never the way it works," with his subsequent musing about "the positive side" of marches and hearts filled with hope. Hope for what? The proposition is cancelled by its antecedent. There can be no hope; Trump's Orwellian authoritarianism will take a brutal hold and persist, since authoritarian regimes never relinquish power.

For all we know, such a thesis could materialize into reality. Yet we also know that this thesis has been peddled annually by the far left since at least the Reagan administration: America's swift decline into reactionary authoritarianism is, according to neurotic Jill Steiners & Predecessors et al, either upon us or lurking ominously in the run-up to the next presidential election, which of course will be cancelled by whoever the Authoritarian of the year is.

Nonetheless, we muddle through quadrennially without emergency decrees or enabling acts or the armed National Guard occupying every street corner. Idiots, crooks, charlatans and even wannabe dictators we've had in the White House before — none quite as egregious as Trump, who fits every aforementioned bill of particulars — yet constitutional checks, institutional vigilance (admittedly, a bit shaky these days) and public expectations have always ensured a relatively peaceful transfer of power.

The next transfer, in 2020, may be as riotous and bloody as 1968's, perhaps even worse. But a transfer there will be, for not even the authoritarian sickness of Trumpism will be powerful enough to overcome more than 230 years of tradition. So I'm going with Gopnik's hope.

Comments

Whenever there is an authoritarian coup rooted in an irrational ideology, well-meaning people insist that it can’t persist because the results are going to be so obviously bad for the people who believe in it, whether it’s the theocratic revolution in Iran or the first truly autocratic Administration in America. Tragically, terribly, this is never the way it works.

Then comes — hope?

On the positive side, well, there were the women’s marches last weekend, which filled any sane heart with hope. What had seemed doubtful a short week before — that there could be unified, peaceful, indeed joyous mass action against the madness — was fully realized, and for what one hopes will be only the first of many times.

I have tried to reconcile Gopnik's initial musing about a "truly autocratic Administration" that will persist (which I interpret, not unfairly I think, as a journey into perpetuity) because its wholesome antithesis is "never the way it works," with his subsequent musing about "the positive side" of marches and hearts filled with hope. Hope for what? The proposition is cancelled by its antecedent. There can be no hope; Trump's Orwellian authoritarianism will take a brutal hold and persist, since authoritarian regimes never relinquish power.

For all we know, such a thesis could materialize into reality. Yet we also know that this thesis has been peddled annually by the far left since at least the Reagan administration: America's swift decline into reactionary authoritarianism is, according to neurotic Jill Steiners & Predecessors et al, either upon us or lurking ominously in the run-up to the next presidential election, which of course will be cancelled by whoever the Authoritarian of the year is.

Nonetheless, we muddle through quadrennially without emergency decrees or enabling acts or the armed National Guard occupying every street corner. Idiots, crooks, charlatans and even wannabe dictators we've had in the White House before — none quite as egregious as Trump, who fits every aforementioned bill of particulars — yet constitutional checks, institutional vigilance (admittedly, a bit shaky these days) and public expectations have always ensured a relatively peaceful transfer of power.

The next transfer, in 2020, may be as riotous and bloody as 1968's, perhaps even worse. But a transfer there will be, for not even the authoritarian sickness of Trumpism will be powerful enough to overcome more than 230 years of tradition. So I'm going with Gopnik's hope.